Thursday, February 26, 2015

Ballets
Russes is a documentary about the performing
institution that popularized ballet in America from the 30’s to the 50’s, told
through some wonderful archival footage and many interviews with the principal
dancers (many of whom happily survived at least until recently), including a
2000 reunion. I am not any kind of ballet fan, but the film has great material
– behind the scenes clashes, breakups, wartime turmoil, adventures in
Hollywood, and so forth, and it’s so engaging that it’s only afterwards that
its limitations really occur to you. For example, the old footage is seen
(perhaps out of necessity) only in fragments, concentrating far more on
providing glimpses of key figures than on illustrating technique, form or overall
shape – our sense of the company’s artistry emerges in the telling much more
than in the showing. There’s an intriguing social history there, of the
popularization of the cultural form, but this too seems secondary to the film’s
celebratory purpose and must be constructed in bits and pieces. And the brief
anecdote of the company’s first black ballerina, who aroused such hostility in
the South (including a backstage Klan visit) that she eventually had to leave
the company, only points up the absence of such weight elsewhere in the film.
To a certain (likely the larger) section of the audience, all of this will of
course not matter at all, and as I say, it didn’t matter that much to me either
as I watched it. The personalities are terrific, and if the movie’s techniques
are conventional, they’re executed with much grace.

Three…Extremes

Three…Extremes is made up of three squirm-inducing stories directed by Park
Chan-wook (Old Boy), Takashi Miike
(mainstay of the film festival’s Midnight Madness section) and Fruit Chan. The
first, by Chan, is called Dumplings –
place your bets for what they’re made of. The second, by Park (a director whose
work I’ve yet to warm to, despite the Tarantino-led accolades), is about a film
director terrorized by an extra, and Miike’s third is the most dream-like and
intriguing, as well as probably the cleverest. Like most compilation movies,
the cumulative impact is relatively limited – no matter how well crafted the
episodes are, they’re pretty much confined to putting across the premise and
then getting off the stage. But variations across all three segments on the
themes of self-disgust and macabre family dynamics lend it a broad feeling of
coherence, and obviously it’s never dull.

By the way, I watched Ballets Russes and Three…Extremes
on the same Sunday afternoon. Isn’t diversity a great thing?

I didn’t much enjoy the stage production of
The Producers when I saw it in
Toronto a couple of years ago, although many said it was hampered by weak
casting of the two leads. There’s no question it felt dead at the centre,
although it was difficult to imagine how high the tacky material could ever be
elevated. The new film version, directed by Susan Stroman (who was also at the
helm for the theatre – this is her first film), confirms all these doubts. Like
the film of Rent, the movie suffers
from woefully inadequate strategizing on what a meaningful cinematic version
might actually consist of, but it’s not as facile as Rent in (to some degree) covering that up with superficial energy
and glitz. The early scene where Nathan Lane’s crooked producer meets Matthew
Broderick’s buttoned-down accountant and quickly starts to lead him astray is
shockingly drab and lifeless (that stuff about the blue blanket is surpassingly
lame), plunging the movie right into the hole.

It’s A Flop!

The main casting innovation, Uma Thurman as
the Swedish bimbo actress, similarly strikes out – Thurman simply can’t lower
herself into this with sufficient conviction (the only mystery is why she felt
inclined to try). The less estimable performers do better. Will Ferrell’s
genetic predisposition to shtick works fine here, and I must admit to getting
my biggest laughs out of Gary Beach (who won a Tony for this) as the
outrageously camp director, particularly during the Springtime for Hitler routine, which all these years later remains
pretty surefire. But these are slim pickings indeed. My mind wandered to other
musicals, not to the likes of Minnelli or Donen (which would be not so much
wandering as inter-galactic leaping) but rather – I admit oddly – to Michael
Ritchie’s filming of another Broadway mainstay, The Fantasticks. Ritchie’s movie was panned and never properly
released, although I caught it once on late night TV. That one’s a choppy and
often threadbare film (the Internet movie database has a long list of scenes
that were cut from it), but it has some moments of beauty, perhaps all the
sweeter for their obviously problematic context. It feels like a movie someone at least cared about making.

Thomas Bezucha’s The Family Stone is ultimately a little disappointing as only a
very good film can be – it’s so very smart and accomplished that you’re
frustrated at its failure to be a masterpiece. The elements of that failure are
pretty clear. The film is about Christmas at a rambunctious liberal family,
where the eldest son (Dermot Mulroney) brings home his girlfriend (Sarah
Jessica Parker) for the first time; they’re loose and liberal; she’s neurotic
and uptight…a disaster looms. The cast includes Diane Keaton, Claire Danes and
Rachel McAdams, all excellent. I haven’t smiled or chuckled as much in any film
this year (no laughs out loud though), and the sentiment got to me too. And a
dinner scene where Parker puts her foot in her mouth all the way up to her
thigh is just about the squirmiest thing I’ve seen all year, including those
giant insects in King Kong.

Turbulent Blessings

And yet…even that fine scene seems a little
contrived and overwritten, pushing Parker’s ineptitude way beyond the point
where someone in her situation would have figured it out and shut it down (or
else had someone step in to shut it down for her). The film ultimately succumbs
to an extreme desire for tidiness, arranging for several unlikely and
under-dramatized character pairings, and tacking on a sentimental
one-year-later epilogue. And it doesn’t really have much to say about anything
at all, except the same old stuff about the turbulent blessings of family. I
thought as a counterpoint of one of my favourite films of the year, Agnes
Jaoui’s Comme une image (Look At Me),
which was similarly well-constructed and accessible and pleasant and
unobtrusive in its style, but which (like Jaoui’s previous film The Taste Of Others) seemed continually
philosophical and probing about the interaction of the social and the personal.
Even Jaoui’s titles are beautifully resonant in a way that The Family Stone just isn’t. I see that I’ve laid out the film’s
faults in much more detail than its virtues, but that’s my own evocation of
family for you – always playing up the negative.

Sunday, February 22, 2015

Ushpizin
(The Guests) is an Israeli movie, directed by Giddi
Dar. It’s a tightly knit tale of faith and tradition, built around a familiar
structure of a disruptive guest; in this case two escaped convicts who turn up
at the house of a former wastrel now turned (fallibly) devout, on the eve of a
sacred festival. The film could have been almost unbearably self-righteous and
stuffy, and sometimes shows signs of heading that way; it’s governed largely by
idealism. But it’s truly deeply felt, and it accumulates a lushly earthy
feeling (one has to admire any picture in which the climactic eating of a lemon
carries a real emotional clout). The central character is a far more subtle
creation than he initially appears, and the milieu is skillfully enough
conveyed that even a distinctly secular viewer might be persuaded by the
construct of God as participating equally in the action with the human
characters. And as with many such films, I can’t help but cite the
anthropological interest as a major attraction in itself. It’s a trite thing to
say, but it’s all an education.

Karen Kusama hasn’t made a film since her
promising debut Girlfight, and Aeon Flux is a surprising return vehicle
– a big budget science fiction thriller with Charlize Theron; it’s set in the
last city on 25th century Earth, and she’s a rebel going up against
the stifling leadership (it’s quite similar in many ways to the recent The Island). The film received attention
mainly for canceling its press screenings – a notorious sign of a panicking
studio – and indeed it's not very good; it’s monotonous, with poorly handled
action sequences. Beyond the images of Theron in her skin-tight costumes, it
blows any possibility of being a modern-day Modesty
Blaise or Barbarella – it’s full
of gimmicky stylistic ideas, but they don’t cohere into anything interesting, I
suppose an action film reflecting a feminine sensibility is still a relatively
rare item – the general tone here is much more nurturing, empathetic, and plain
soft than you’ll get from most action packages, but in this context that seems
as much a sign of resignation as subversion.

Good
Night, and Good Luck became the only second movie
this year that pulled me to a quick second visit (2046 was the first). It again struck me as impeccable in virtually
every respect (although I'll admit that the second visit didn’t yield the
additional layerings that one expects from the greatest of films). If
there were an Oscar for overall contribution, George Clooney would surely be
the winner for this year. On the one hand, Syriana
communicates the corruption and bastardized idealism underlying global
politics; knowingly complicated and sometimes impenetrable, it barely allows
the faintest scope for optimism. Meanwhile, the Ed Murrow movie looks back
fifty years, excavating some of the roots of our craven capitulation – our
willingness to submit to easy gratification and insulation – and imprinting a
profound sense of loss, but not without a romantic wistfulness that may leave
the viewer with at least a fleeting sense of determination.

I can name only a handful of moments in Good Night, and Good Luck that I'd
possibly want to change. One of those is the scene of Murrow asking the young
Liberace (in real archival footage) if he hopes to get married one day, and the
pianist’s carefully worded response about hoping to find “the right mate. “
Compared to the film’s overall subtleties it seems like an easy laugh, although
even this has its place in establishing the era’s hypocrisy and repressiveness
in personal matters, and thus in diluting any possibility of reading the movie
as being largely unfiltered nostalgia.

The
Chronicles of Narnia: the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe has been closely pre-scrutinized in some circles, not because
anyone needs another big-budget fantasy blockbuster, but for its adherence to
the Christian subtext of C. S. Lewis’ source novel (which I haven’t read); if
you don’t know, it’s about four children who tumble through a magical wardrobe
into a wondrous realm of talking animals and strange creatures, where they are
quickly greeted as the instruments of a prophecy that will defeat the evil
ruling the land. As directed by Andrew Adamson (Shrek) it’s a very smooth creation with an even-handed and
matter-of-fact tone, effortlessly blending the real and the digital: you
suspend your own disbelief as effortlessly as the children do (for example,
they adapt to the Cockney beavers within a couple of minutes). So what about
that big issue? Well, sure, the subtext is there if you want it, and to my
inexpert sensibility it seems pretty respectful. In particular, when the lion
Aslan sacrifices himself for the forces of good and is later reborn, that’s
kind of reminiscent of…well, you know. What the actual value of that recognition
is, well, that’s beyond me. Maybe it’s just about reinforcement through
repetition (I guess it’s also pretty exciting when the face of Jesus shows up
on a potato chip). Although what big budget fantasy epic doesn’t lay on the higher power backdrop – from Star Wars’ Force through the Matrix and
so on…

The film is too restrained, and in truth
its young actors are a little too inexpert, for the themes of good and evil to
carry much visceral weight. And the eagerness of the inhabitants of Narnia to
idolize their human visitors seemed to me as plausible an allegory for an
unelected monarchy as for anything less earthly. No matter. It’s a colourful,
engaging, thankfully unportentous film.

If the chatter at my office is anything to
go by, Memoirs of a Geisha, rather
than Narnia or King Kong, was the season’s most anticipated release – looks like a
lot of people (and yes, I mean women) loved that book. I haven’t read it, but
I’m confident it would never have caught on as it did if it had been as affectless
as Rob Marshall’s movie. Marshall seems at home with the easy spectacle,
although even then his approach is conventional.But he seems to hold his fine lead actors at
arm’s length (Gong Li in particular seems game for something much more full-blooded)
– not helped by the ill-fated decision to avoid subtitles and use English
dialogue. The movie is overly discreet about the nature of being a geisha – one
could easily come away with the impression that the requirement is to have sex
just one time in a career, and to spend the rest of the time tiptoeing around
serving tea. The portrayal of the protagonist’s decline during the war is
rushed, robbing the thing of any overall dramatic shape. And her great romance
– with a much older man she first meets at the age of 9 – merely seems creepy
and distasteful. The movie has reasonable craft, but lousy instincts.

Thursday, February 12, 2015

Several of my very favourite commercial
releases this year barely qualify as that – they played at the 2004 film
festival and then at the Cinematheque. And Head-On
played only one or two nights at the Goethe Institute, before making a low-key
one-week return later on. Still, you take your movies where you can. Apologies
to any masterpieces released right at the end of the year. Here’s the list.

The
World (Jia Zhang-ke)

This was my introduction to the work of
Chinese auteur Jia - I didn’t see his acclaimed film Platform until later. The
World - focusing on a young boyfriend and girlfriend, both working in a
Beijing theme park filled with scaled-down replicas of world landmarks - is an
engrossing work, illustrating a China in transition, touching on its persistent
poverty (especially rurally), its abiding mystery and its banality. It’s a
melancholy film, but it’s also filled with humour and incident and is a
continuously fascinating work of anthropology – it’s particularly attuned
toward women and the forces that drive them toward merely superficial
advancement, ornamentation or even prostitution.

Cafe
Lumiere (Hou Hsiao-Hsien)

What a pleasure that Café Lumiere (dedicated to Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu) is the
most narratively accessible of the Hou films I’ve seen. It follows a young
woman, three months pregnant and just back from Taiwan, as she criss-crosses
Tokyo, visiting parents or friends, working on a research project, but most
often simply seen in transit. Both thematically and in its technique, the film
seems to be about self-definition and its contingencies and choices. This
subject might have entailed Hou’s most diverse, ambitious canvas yet, but he
responds instead by honing down to his simplest, purest film.

Moolaade (Ousmane Sembene)

It’s amazing that this year brought a new
film by Sembene, the pioneer of African cinema. His astonishing Moolaade, if it turns out to be his last
film, will stand as a triumphant summation of his career. It’s simple in its
technique, with the unadorned clarity and straightforward quality of a
children’s story (although its subject is genital mutilation), but it exposes
both the beauty and brutality of Africa with powerful eloquence.

Comme
Une Image (Agnes Jaoui)

Jaoui’s follow-up to The Taste of Others revolves around an essentially monstrous author
and publisher and a group of characters whose spiritual health lies in the
distance they manage to put between themselves and him. The film understands
that such monsters are created as much by the structures around them as by
rampant pathology; the title suggests how identity is as much social as
personal. The film always stays in familiar, easily assimilated territory, it’s
unobtrusive in its style and acted in a pleasant register, but it’s entirely
scintillating, examining in surprising detail a range of shifting tastes and
possibilities.

2046 (Wong Kar-Wai)

Wong Kar-Wai’s 2046 is an astonishing work of cinematic design – one of those
films that rapidly exhausts your powers of absorption on first viewing. The
director reportedly reedited the film continually over a period of several
years, and the result is an extraordinarily intricate tapestry of memory and
association. It takes off from Wong’s In the
Mood for Love, based around the same late 60’s Hong Kong setting, but the
canvas now involves multiple women, multiple moments of loss and regret, and an
occasional evocation of future worlds. The film uses time as an accordion,
thrilling you with its structural sophistication; it’s also emotionally enthralling
and immensely evocative. This was the only film this year that I felt demanded
an almost immediate second viewing.

Junebug (Phil Morrison)

This is a low budget film about a North
Carolina family when the eldest son, who long ago moved away to Chicago,
returns to visit, with a sophisticated new wife. It’s an astoundingly subtle
picture, spare but perfectly weighted, accumulating a remarkable series of
implications. No recent film better portrays the “American heartland” so often
referred to – George W. Bush isn’t mentioned in the movie, but it tells you
everything you need to know about how he gets away with it – and it’s a
borderline-horrific portrayal of family dynamics. The film is ambiguous enough
that it could alternatively be read as a light, quirky semi-comedy (it works
just fine as such) – as such it’s a masterful prism for prevailing complacency,
and a great achievement by the unknown Morrison.

Good
Night, and Good Luck (George Clooney)

I loved George Clooney’s highly disciplined
account of how CBS News took on Joseph McCarthy in the 1950’s. The impeccably
controlled David Straithairn is mesmerizing as Murrow, and despite the film’s
stripped down air – it focuses almost entirely on work processes (flawlessly
fusing new and found footage), runs only an hour and a half and seldom moves
outside the newsroom or a few other bland interiors – it’s distinctly romantic
and even subtly mystic. Between this and the gloomier Syriana, Clooney certainly deserves some kind of recognition for
the year’s most striking overall contribution.

Head-On (Fatih Akin)

This is a fascinating, often fiery movie
about the marriage and love affair (in that order) of two German Turks. It
initially seems almost like a distended commentary on the impossibility of
transcending one’s roots, but works an unpredictable way toward a universal
poignancy that almost evokes Casablanca;
sometimes it seems too simplistic in how it lays out various tensions for our
examination, but few films have such constant feisty variation and vigour.

Broken
Flowers (Jim Jarmusch)

This laconic tale of
so-laidback-he’s-hardly-there Bill Murray visiting a stream of old girlfriends
has an easy sweetness, bolstered by wonderful performances from all concerned.
For some of its length it’s a little underwhelming, with the director’s deadpan
minimalism seeming like an affectation rather than a meaningful worldview.
Ultimately though it all comes together, placing Murray at the centre of a
significant perception shift, and allowing you to see the craft and nuance
behind the movie’s every element.

The
Family Stone (Thomas Bezucha)

Bezucha’s debut film - about Christmas at a
rambunctious liberal family - is ultimately a little disappointing as only a
very good movie can be – it’s so very smart and accomplished that you’re
frustrated at its failure to be a masterpiece. Comme une image is a particularly useful reference point in
demonstrating how The Family Stone is
ultimately insufficiently philosophical and probing, and ultimately succumbs to
an excessive desire for tidiness. But I haven’t smiled or chuckled as much in
any film this year, and the sentiment got to me too. So it makes the cut.

Among others that might have made it: Nobody Knows, Los Angeles Plays Itself, War of the Worlds, Saraband,
Yes, Grizzly Man, A History Of Violence, Brokeback Mountain, King Kong (yes!) and lots of movies in the tier just below that. And now on
to 2006, with Match Point and The New World already in our sights. Not
to mention that Disney movie about the eight huskies that get stranded! Happy
New Year!

Thursday, February 5, 2015

What kind of title is that - Christmas
Movies? Wasn’t that a long time ago already? And Tamara Jenkins’ The Savages didn’t deliver much seasonal
cheer. An old man’s long-time girlfriend dies and he’s suddenly homeless, with
escalating dementia. His two middle-aged children, who he’s hardly talked to
for years, need to sort out his future, even though they can hardly handle the
basics of their own lives. Played by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney
(so, obviously, there’s no problem here on the acting front), they are both
intellectuals with an interest in theatre, both up against a severe ceiling in
their careers and emotional lives (someone pointed out that their names, John
and Wendy, evoke Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up).

The Savages

The title refers to their surname, but also
indicates the unusual chilliness of the approach. There’s no easy sentiment
here, no last-minute making up for lost time. The father (played by Philip
Bosco) is kept rather distant within the film’s scheme; John barely betrays a
moment’s real emotion at the situation, and although Wendy is more
demonstrative, she never seems to be engaging with the individuality of the old
man before her. The movie isn’t static – they both move ahead, but just in the
way that life incrementally nudges you forward.

It’s broadly classifiable as a comedy
(Jenkins’ only previous film, the very good Slums
of Beverly Hills, was more plainly that), but most of the laughs are of a
low-key and rather desperate quality. The only conventionally “pretty” shots in
the film come at the very start, portraying an Arizona retirement community,
but that’s quickly revealed as an enclave of hypocrisy, having little to do
with most people’s experience of old age and death (summed up by Hoffman in a
stinging outburst). Almost everything else looks ugly and tawdry. Ultimately,
the film’s depiction of old-age dilemmas is more convincing and wrenching than,
say, that of Away From Her, but the
toughest punch is one of indifference; even at his darkest hour, there’s never
a sense that the old man’s plight matters more to his children than their own.

Enchanted

I eventually got round to seeing Kevin
Lima’s Enchanted- given my Grinch-like aversion to sitting
among a bunch of happy kids, I needed to wait until the theatres had mostly
cleared out. As it was, I’m sure I was as happy as any of the kids, although it
may not have showed up on my face as much. This is the movie about a cartoon
princess from a classic fairy tale kingdom, sent by a wicked witch through the
vortex into modern-day Manhattan. It’s a culture shock, but her sunny attitude
never wavers. She falls in with a single dad and his wide-eyed kid, while
waiting for her handsome prince to come rescue her.

As G-rated movies go, this isn’t Ratatouille - it’s not thematically
ambitious, and doesn’t have the superb overall shape of that animated marvel.
But it’s still one of those creations that make you marvel at the current state
of the medium. The technology and the coordination dazzle you, but it’s also on
top of the basics –the script keeps things light and funny without getting
crass, and everything’s primed to spread happiness. The scenes in the middle of
Times Square, the arrival point from the other world, don’t seem quite
integrated into the rest – they feel more like Letterman stunts – but it just
adds to the charm.

Amy Adams, who was Oscar-nominated for Junebug, seems to me a little old for
the princess role (she’s 33), but brings immense conviction to it. Even if the
movie wasn’t as well executed, she’d go a long way to convincing you otherwise.
Ultimately, Enchanted does a better
job of making you believe in the power of true love’s kiss than, say, Michael
Moore’s movies do on selling their various agendas. Doesn’t that sound like a Christmas movie,
speaking secularly of course?

Charlie Wilson’s War

Adams also turns up in Mike Nichols’ new
film Charlie Wilson’s War, trailing
sunnily behind the eponymous congressman as he manoeuvres through the corridors
of 1980’s Washington power, with side trips to the Middle East. Based on a true
story, although who knows how closely, it’s the account of how Wilson, a
congressman at the time better known for character flaws than leadership
substance, spearheaded the effort to adequately arm the Afghan mujahedeen
against their Russian occupiers (he saw a Dan Rather report on TV while hanging
out naked in a hot-tub with some coke-snorting strippers, and it caught his
imagination).

Nichols is as polished and smooth a
craftsman as they come, and the film is written by Aaron Sorkin, who proved
with West Wing that he can create a
compelling, highly articulate illusion of how important things work. Remarkably
for such a sprawling subject, it runs barely more than an hour and a half, and
is cast with three major league Oscar winners: Tom Hanks as Wilson, Julia
Roberts as a Texan society woman who attaches herself to such noble causes, and
(most quirkily and indelibly) Philip Seymour Hoffman again, as a CIA operative.
There’s obviously major compression going on here – even the most sensitive
negotiations are dispensed with in a breezy five minutes – but one assumes
we’re getting the story’s major arc at least.

What we’re ultimately looking at, of
course, is the birth of the armed radical Moslem movement that led to the
Taliban and beyond. This is acknowledged in the film, and after his military
achievement we see Wilson trying to squeeze much smaller sums out of Congress
for education and reconstruction, without success (by then everyone’s
preoccupied with “restructuring Eastern Europe”): the movie ends on an
unprintable version of the adage about winning the war and losing the peace.
The ongoing relevance of this hardly needs to be underlined.

Still, Charlie
Wilson’s War isn’t a movie that arouses anger. This leads to dismissals
such as James Rocchi’s: “There’s subtlety, and then there’s invisibility…(the
film) is timid where it should be reckless, clever where it should be cutting,
funny where it should be fierce.” True enough, and Hanks, although very effective,
would probably have given much the same performance if recreating the Dean
Martin Variety Hour; indeed, the film’s best sequence, involving lots of
frantic movement between one room and the next and intertwining conversations,
is pure farce. One also wonders about the apparent use of real amputee children
in the scene where Wilson visits a refugee camp; the sequence affects us as it
does him, but Nichols hasn’t figured out how to fuse such raw stories of pain
with Hollywood glamour without seeming rather gauche.

In other areas the film executes classic
Hollywood velvet glove manoeuvres, such as in the gentle handling of Pakistan’s
President Zia. It’s probably fair to conclude that one should approach the film
with skepticism, but you’d miss out on a good time if you didn’t approach it at
all. Kind of like Christmas!

About Me

From 1997 to 2014 I wrote a weekly movie column for Toronto's Outreach Connection newspaper. The paper has now been discontinued and I've stopped writing new articles, but I continue to post my old ones here over time. I also aim to post a daily movie review on Twitter (torontomovieguy) and I occasionally tweet on other matters (philosopherjack).